The EU’s High Level Expert group will provide strategic advice to the European Commission on research data sharing, data stewardship and data reuse in the context of the implementation of the ‘European Open Science Cloud' - part of the Commission Digital Single Market Strategy. The advice will help set the strategic direction of this initiative, including broad implementation criteria, the mechanisms of sustainable funding and the governance of a data sharing and reuse infrastructure for Europe. The group will also prepare the agenda for a wider meeting of e-infrastructures stakeholders, including ESFRI, IMI, BIC and ERC and specific initiatives in the member states.

The ‘European Open Science Cloud’ is perceived as a sustainable infrastructure for the management and long-term stewardship of research data, with the final aim to accelerate discovery and innovation. Science in Europe should be supported by the infrastructure and it should make existing data infrastructures in different domains more interoperable. The infrastructure should obviously be placed in global context. Also, it will have to support controlled access to data where this is needed for reasons of privacy or data protection.